Radio journalist gets suspended prison sentence and is banned from working

Reporters Without Borders voiced support today for the Peruvian press freedom group, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), in its defence of radio journalist Luis Aguirre Pastor, who has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence for alleged defamation and has been banned from working as a journalist on the grounds that he has no degree. "The sentence imposed on Pastor is out of all proportion to what he is alleged to have done," Reporters Without Borders said. "Furthermore, practising the trade of journalism may not be conditioned on membership of a professional association or any other body that is supposed to supervise the profession." Pastor often criticised the involvement of the local authorities in illegal logging and gold trafficking in the southeastern Amazonian region of Madre de Dios, where he was a journalist with the Puerto Maldonado-based regional radio station La Voz de Madre de Dios. A lower court sentenced him on 19 September 2003 to a two-year suspended prison term for defamation and "insult." He was also ordered to stop working as a journalist on the grounds that he has no university degree or appropriate training. A higher court upheld the sentence on appeal on 4 February. The IPYS called for special protection of Pastor on 18 February, saying he was "shut up in his home, depressed and exposed to possible reprisals." Pastor is the second journalist to receive a heavy sentence for defamation since the start of the year, following Julio Jara Ladrón de Guevara, the editor of the Cuzco-based daily El Comercio, who received a one-year suspended prison sentence on 19 January.